Peace

9th Sep 2015

a small Syrian boy in a red shirt, blue shorts, and worn shoes, lying
face down in wet sand, his head cocked to one side along a gray,
glistening shoreline, his lifeless hands cupped upwards, his knees
slightly bent.

My first reaction was despair. My second was: My child sleeps just like that.

The attention this photo has received has generated discomfort as well as indignation—for understandable reasons. There are important ethical questions
surrounding the taking or sharing of photos of children, dead or alive,
in the media, including questions about the intent of the sharers and
the consent of the subject. The scale of the Syrian tragedy is orders of
magnitude greater, and infinitely more variegated, than this one
picture, or this one victim’s story, can possibly convey. Over the last
four and a half years, an estimated 240,000 people have died in the grinding violence, including nearly 12,000 children. More than half of Syria’s pre-war population—half, the proportional equivalent of nearly 170 million Americans—have been forced to flee their homes, spawning the largest exodus of refugees in a generation. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Syrian children won’t be going back to school this fall.